Saturday, June 13, 2009

Straight line vote reports in Iran election



This is a difficult graphic to explain even for someone like me who is willing to believe Ahmadinejad won.

More information will be coming out. We'll see.

Posted by Arnold Evans at 5:28 PM

4 comments:

Steve said...

Go ahead and believe that Ahmadinejad won, but can you seriously believe he won with 62% of the vote? 52% maybe, but not 62%.

June 13, 2009 at 5:51 PM
Ziad said...

I have no idea what happened in Iran, But Ronald Reagan won 61% of the vote in 1984 and Richard Nixon the same in 1972.

It is also the margin Ahmedinejad won in 2005 against Rafsanjani, the ultimate insider, billionaire and former 2 term president.

That doesn't mean that Ahmadinejad won fair and square. Perhaps it was pure vote fraud. But its entirely plausible that he won.

June 13, 2009 at 6:03 PM
Arnold Evans said...

Now, the straight line may not be so unusual.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/statistical-evidence-does-not-prove.html

With that off the table, the most suspicious thing in my opinion is the quick vote count.

I found Mousavi's early announcement that he had won and that an Ahmadinejad victory necessarily points to vote fraud to be extremely provocative. Releasing early results may have been a reaction to that.

It has to be kept in mind that Ahmadinejad is not picking on a defenseless opponent. Mousavi, a former Prime Minister himself, is aligned with Rafsanjani, the chair of the Assembly of Experts that has the power to remove the Supreme Leader.

If this is fraud, there are in Iran a tremendous amount of political resources that can be put to finding and proving the fraud and reversing this outcome.

I'm reading a lot of reports that Ahmadinejad won the debates. I do not think a 62% victory is impossible.

Ahmadinejad, possibly more than any president before him, really actively worked to cultivate his following. As he and many others says, he visited every province and made himself accessible to common Iranians.

The opposition had clearly coalesced around Mousavi, meaning I'm not surprised that the other reformist candidates did very poorly as it became well known that this is a contest between two candidates and so it would be unwise to waste a vote on one of the others.

So, I find myself going back and forth, but I now lean towards the results most likely being accurate.

June 13, 2009 at 6:29 PM
Anonymous said...

the detail results are on the Iran interior ministry website.
There is no obvious indication of any rigging.
In Tabriz the votes of Ahmadinejad/Mousavi is almost even only 15000 more for Mousavi.

June 14, 2009 at 3:31 PM

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